BrickAndMortar: A Solid Foundation for Software Projects

What is BrickAndMortar?

Many programming environments have dependency managers for their own libraries, such as Bundler for Ruby, Pip for Python, Node Package Manager for Node, and others. A problem arises however, if one needs to use packages from many environments, those that are in any dependency manager's library, or those written in languages that lack widespread dependency manager support such as C and C++.

BrickAndMortar is a meant to fill this gap and be a catch-all dependency manager for these projects that require a little extra glue to hold their foundation together.

It is not nearly as fancy a tool as Bundler or the like that does dependency conflict checking and automated updates. Instead, it seeks to do one much less ambitious, but nonetheless extremely useful job:

Ensure that all specified dependencies, from here on called bricks, are linked or copied (not yet implemented) into the project's vendor directory, recursively.

Supported Systems

Currently only targeted for *nix. Tested on Ubuntu and Mac OS X.

Requirements

• Ruby (>= 2.0, 1.9 might work as well but it has not been tested yet)

Usage

1. Install brick_and_mortar gem with gem install brick_and_mortar
2. Write a Brickfile in your project's root directory that has the following fields:

name ~ The name of the dependency. The directory or link that will be present in the vendor directory will have this name.

version ~ The version of the brick as a string in whatever format is natural for it. This will be appended to the directory name of the copy of the brick downloaded in the $BRICK_STORE_PREFIX/.brick_store directory.

location ~ Location of the brick. Either local system path, version control repository (Git, Mercurial, and Subversion currently supported), or URL. zip, tar.gz, and tar.bz2 are the only currently supported compressed URL package formats.

3. Run mortar to install bricks to vendor, downloading them if necessary to $BRICK_STORE_PREFIX/.brick_store.

Settings

(None of this is implemented yet).

Write a $HOME/.brick_and_mortarrc file to specify:

BRICK_STORE_PREFIX ~ The directory that contains .brick_store. As the name suggests, .brick_store is where all bricks will be stored before they are linked or copied into the vendor directories of individual projects.

DEFAULT_BRICK_SHARING_POLICY ~ Specify the default behavior when placing bricks in projects. Accepts either - copy, where the brick will be copied into vendor, or - link, where the brick will be symbolically linked into vendor. Defaults to link.

License

Copyright Dustin Morrill, 2015-2017

MIT License